Your website traffic can say a lot about your brand’s success. For instance, without traffic, how do you keep your sales funnel full? Dwindling traffic means fewer people visit your site, which will eventually lead to a decrease in sales – something we all want to avoid.
Whether you’re new to monitoring online traffic or have noticed a steady decline in your own website traffic, it’s important to know just how to turn things around. However, before diving into ways to improve your website traffic, it’s essential to cover a few basics.
What Exactly is Website Traffic?
Website traffic, in a nutshell, is the number of people who visit your website. It is also commonly referred to as website sessions. Monitoring your website traffic helps you measure your marketing efforts’ effectiveness because it shows you who is visiting your website, where they are coming from, what actions they are taking, and so on.
How to Monitor Your Website Traffic
You can monitor your website traffic easily, especially with the help of free tools, such as Google Analytics. Tools such as these help you keep track of key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you determine the success of a page, the type of content you are sharing, and so much more.
Important KPIs you’ll want to keep an eye on include:
- Sessions – usually calculated over a predetermined period, such as a week or a year
- Users – indicates the total number of people visiting your page
- User locations – tells you who’s visiting from where
- Pageviews – number of views a page receives
- Time spent on site/page
- Returning visitors – this can also be defined as non-unique visitors (unique visitors would be new visitors)
- Link clicks – number of clicks a link received
Each of these KPIs tells you important pieces of information about your audience. For example, time spent on a page can tell you just how effective your content is at capturing and maintaining your visitors’ interest. If your 1000-word blog has an average view time of under a minute, then you can deduct that people aren’t taking the time to read through the entire thing. However, if you’ve created the content with scannability in mind, then the success may not be in the time spent on the page but the number of clicks your call-to-action receives.
3 Ways to Improve Your Website Traffic
After you’ve taken the time to review your website traffic and other metrics, you should have an idea of ways to help you improve your traffic overall. However, if you are still stumped, here are three ways to help you improve your website traffic:
1. Prioritize Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Chances are, you already are practicing regular content creation (and if you aren’t, that’s another great way to improve your website traffic!). However, if you aren’t taking the time to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) best practices, then your content may not be bringing in nearly as much traffic as you’d hope.
SEO helps get your content seen by the right people searching for certain keywords and keyword phrases. When used properly, these keywords stand out to search engine crawlers, and when implemented correctly, help get your pages seen by those searching for solutions.
2. Increase Your Social Media Presence
Social media marketing is growing exponentially because it allows brands direct access to their ideal target audience. If you’re creating content regularly yet aren’t seeing the website traffic you’d like, you need to consider that the right audience isn’t seeing your content.
If you have a social media presence already, you can leverage that audience by sharing your content with them on your various platforms. However, if you don’t yet have a social media presence, then now’s the time to jump on the bandwagon.
With approximately half the world’s population using social media, you are losing out on direct contact with some of your most valuable customers by not having a social media presence. Now, that’s not to say you want to simply create a profile on every platform you can think of. Instead, take the time to conduct digital marketing channel research to see where your audience is spending their time and share your website content there.
3. Consider Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves working directly with social media influencers within your niche to get your content seen by a greater audience.
In most cases, influencer marketing works by offering something to a social media influencer (such as free products or monetary payment), and in return, they would talk about your brand, product, or services on their social media channel, which can do wonders to help boost your website’s traffic.
With social media marketing continuing to gain popularity, it’s no surprise that marketers believe influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing.
Improve Your Website Traffic with Help from CadenceSEO Consulting
Your website traffic is an important metric to monitor regularly because as soon as you notice a downward trend appearing, you know that it’s time to act. If you’ve noticed this trend and don’t quite know how to reverse it, then talking with a dedicated digital marketing consulting team can help.
If you need help getting your website traffic back on track, then consider getting a FREE website analysis today by a team you can trust.